he was in custody, or now that he’s dead. But if you heard he was alive and on the loose and had returned to England? I can see you being afraid that he might decide to pay you back for what you did to him all those years ago.”
Seaforth sucked in a quick breath, then hissed, “What are you suggesting?”
“You know what I’m suggesting.”
A naked succession of emotions flickered across the Earl’s face, consternation mingled with outrage and fury and something that looked like fear. “Don’t be ridiculous. If I’d known Nicholas was in town, all I’d have needed to do would be to inform the authorities and let them kill him.”
“If you knew where he was. But if you didn’t?”
Seaforth pushed up from his chair with such force that he sent it thumping back across the carpet. “You go too far, Devlin. You hear me? You go too far.”
Sebastian rose slowly to his feet, his hands curled loosely at his sides. “Believe me, I’ve only just begun.”
He thought for a moment that Seaforth might try to throw a punch. But the man simply tossed his journal aside and strode rapidly away.
* * *
Having sent Tom home with the curricle, Sebastian walked the hot, dusty streets of Westminster, his thoughts on the past. The sun was sinking low in the sky, casting long shadows. But even close to the river, the heat was still oppressive.
He couldn’t stop thinking about the man Nicholas Hayes had once been—an earl’s youngest son, army mad, reckless, headstrong, and passionate. A man much like Sebastian himself. But Hayes’s life had gone disastrously awry, beginning with an ill-fated elopement that led to banishment and a dangerous refuge. And then . . . what? Theft? Attempted rape? Murder?
Sebastian found himself doubting it all. Yet he knew too that his tendency to see his own life reflected in the life of Nicholas Hayes could be blinding him to an ugly reality.
So what do we actually know? thought Sebastian as he reached the Thames. He paused to look out over the sun-sparkled expanse of the river and felt a welcome evening breeze lift off the water to cool his face. What do we know for certain?
The truth was they knew almost nothing about the man found dead up in Somer’s Town except that he’d spent three miserable years as a convict before using a rock to obliterate the features of a corpse and stealing its identity to escape the living hell to which he’d been condemned. Then after fifteen years of freedom he’d risked it all by returning to England. Why?
The only explanation that made sense was a burning desire for revenge unquenched by the passage of time. So then the question became, revenge on whom?
His cousin, the new Earl of Seaforth, for betraying him to the authorities and appropriating the inheritance that should by rights have been his? The Count de Compans—particularly if the Frenchman had lied about the circumstances surrounding his wife’s death?
Who else?
Theo Brownbeck, for refusing to allow Hayes to marry his daughter? Also possible, Sebastian decided, although that seemed more of a stretch.
So, LaRivière and Seaforth, and possibly Brownbeck. But as he stared off across the darkening waters of the river, Sebastian found his thoughts returning to the flintlock pistol he’d found lying at the bottom of the sea trunk in the Red Lion. If Nicholas Hayes had been planning to meet either LaRivière or Seaforth that night in Pennington’s Tea Gardens, surely he would have taken the pistol with him. So why hadn’t he?
The obvious explanation was that he’d gone to the gardens that night planning to meet someone else. So who?
Who?
Chapter 22
S omeone was following him again.
Sebastian became aware of the man’s persistent presence as he walked up Cockspur Street toward home. The light was fading slowly from the sky, casting the street into deep purple shadow. The breeze from the river was growing stronger, flickering the flames of the recently lit streetlamps and scuttling a loose playbill along the gutter.
When Sebastian paused to gaze into a pastry shop’s window, the following footsteps stopped. When he walked on, the footsteps started up again, carefully matching Sebastian’s speed.
He caught a glimpse of the man as he crossed Piccadilly: a middle-aged tradesman, by the looks of him, in a shabby corduroy coat and greasy waistcoat. They continued up Berkeley Street to the square, then Davies. Whistling softly, Sebastian abruptly turned into the narrow entrance to John Street and flattened himself against the brick wall of